David Cameron proves too expensive for the Labour Party's political broadcast

The Labour Party have had to omit a photo of David Cameron with Rebekah Brooks
from their upcoming political broadcast after the cost was deemed too high.

David Cameron gives a speech at the Conservative Spring ConferencePhoto: PAUL GROVER

By Tim Walker

7:30AM BST 03 Apr 2012

After Gillman & Soame, the school and university photographers, took a “policy decison” to forbid any further reproduction of its study of David Cameron posing with his Bullingdon Club chums, the Prime Minister now has Dafydd Jones to thank for not furnishing the Labour Party with another equally embarrassing picture.

The society photographer was approached by Silverfish TV, the production company that is making Labour’s next party political broadcast, who asked him for the rights to use his snap of Cameron drinking champagne with Rebekah Brooks some years before she resigned from News International in the midst of the phone-hacking scandal.

“I was uneasy about it being used in this way,” admits Jones, who suggested a fee that he imagined would be too much for their budget. It was. The request suggests that Labour is persisting with its policy of attacking Cameron in often personal terms, rather than offering its own proposals for dealing with the country’s ills.

The picture was taken in 2009 when Cameron attended, with George Osborne, the launch party for a book called Citizen that Brooks’s husband, Charlie, had written. I recall the event because of the way Osborne had glared at me when I had walked in.

It was only when I got back to the office and mentioned it that my colleagues made the point that Osborne was unlikely to be thrilled with me for breaking the story, a few months earlier, of how he had been hobnobbing with Lord Mandelson on a yacht owned by Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch, off Corfu.